UK Endemol’s brilliant idea was to make the box-openers fellow contestants - players-to-be. They all wear identical showgirl costumes. In other countries, such as the U.S., the people behind the boxes, the box-openers, are professional models, former Playboy centrefolds, etc. “When Endemol developed the format for British television, they came up with a brilliant idea. The atmosphere in which the show is produced is very similar to the conditions inside a cult: Ronson makes an astute observation that partly explains why the British version of the show, unlike the American version which was canned years ago, is so insanely successful. I recently stumbled upon a surprisingly eye-opening decade-old investigation in which writer Jon Ronson spent time as a fly-on-the-wall inside the filming of the British version of the show. Perhaps the show taps into a kind of magical thinking that many people are predisposed to, making the show uniquely compelling.

For the show’s regulars, the concept never gets old.

Yet somehow the show’s host, participants, and presumably the show’s viewers, never fail to be whipped up into an absolute frenzy, week after week. What is the attraction in watching a show that consists of nothing but uninformed speculation? To me, this sounds like not only a nightmare, but also a pointless nightmare. Over the course of the last decade, well over 2000 episodes have been broadcast in over 50 countries from Albania to America. Periodically, a “banker” offers to buy the contestant’s box that may or may not contain the jackpot. version), eliminating other boxes in the process by guessing randomly, while the show’s host suggests the guesses are somehow reliably informed by the contestant’s feelings. A contestant spends half an hour guessing whether a box has a colossal amount of money in it (a million dollars in the U.S.

Somehow the show created by Dutch producer Endemol is phenomenally successful despite consisting of nothing but sheer guesswork.įor the uninitiated, in every single episode the very same thing happens. I’ve always been fascinated by the continuing global popularity of the hit British TV show Deal or No Deal, which is essentially a drawn out weekly recital of the Monty Hall Problem.

Deal or nodeal